Louistrations

Page 52 has been added to naut-cotic.

Adding pages on unspecified days is far more fun than scheduled weekly updates, don't you think? Will there or won't there be an update? Nobody knows! It's almost like a game! Admittedly it's not a very good game, but neither is Russian Roulette.

I think I made this one a little obscure, please read it carefully.

Page 51 of naut-cotic has now been uploaded. The wait for the next page shouldn't be quite as long as this one. Hehe!

Work is well under way for wave 3 of naut-cotic (A wave is the name I give to a mass revision, I'm not sure where I picked that up from!). I don't have anything to show you just yet, but I'm really pushing to get back to regular updates in the near future.

You'd be right in thinking that this seems a little familiar, it's the same basic comic as the previous one but in an entirely different setting. It also took longer to complete than the last one. I started working on it a little over three months ago, admittedly it's not been everyday; but it still feels like I've spent forever working on it. It's hard to justify putting so much time into a single six panel comic strip. Regardless, I'm happy to say it's finally finished and move on to something else.

If you're interested, I've posted below snapshots of the piece taken at various stages of it's creation. All the way from the initial scribbles to the final composition.

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Finally, after weeks of rampant speculation, scandals and supposed 'leaked' charts; The fourth annual chart of Louis' favourite teas has been made public. I would like to thank the many companies that have supplied me with tea over the past year, as well as the throngs of website visitors that have stayed up all night especially to see the results.

1. Sencha, Ujinotsuyu Co. Ltd. (New Entry)
2. Make Mine a Builders (New Entry)
3. Ceylon, J. Atkinson and Co. (-2)
4. Ringtons (-1)
5. Yorkshire Tea (-3)
6. White Tea, Clipper (New Entry)
7. Darjeeling, Whittard
8. PG Tips (-4)

Now here's something completely unexpected. A new comic page has been uploaded to naut-cotic. This is the first new page in, what? 16 months?

naut-cotic obviously hasn't been the centre of my attention for the past few months, although I have occasionally worked on it. Most of my time has been spent rewriting the dialogue in its entirety. Something that really needed to be done.

I also built a new website that was a mere lick away from being finished. Unfortunately, I lost the site when a hard drive died on me last month. So unless I find a DVD-R with a backup of the site on it, all I'm left with is a backup from last year; which isn't much use.

Anyway its left me with the opportunity to begin a new wave, there are a lot of changes to character designs and the overall style that I've been wanting to make. My plan is to finish off the chapter on the existing website as it stands. There's only 4 pages to the end of the chapter and these were already drawn some time ago. I'll be uploading these over a non-defined timescale, but I'll go out on a limb and say that it'll probably be less than 16 months.

Hashizumemon Tsuzuki Yagura Turret, Kanazawa Castle. Like the majority of historical buildings in Japan, Kanazawa Castle has a long history of repeatedly burning down. Matsumoto Castle was the only exception that I noticed for not burning down. What you see here is a faithful reconstruction that was completed in 2001.

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Torii gate and red maple leaves.

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Lake Kawaguchi next to Fujiyama.

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In total I took over 800 photographs - far less than Peter and Barry - but a large amount nonetheless. To spare you all, I have siphoned my photographs down to my favourite 60. I won't be reposting any of the photographs that have appeared previously on the website, but if you go back to the original posts you'll find that you are now able to click the images to view a larger size.

Peter took some really incredible photographs, they really put mine to shame! If you get the chance you should go visit his deviantART page where he has started posting some of his best ones.

Some of the text accompanying the photographs was written on location which didn't get the opportunity to be posted, so apologies if the tense jumps around a bit.

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